Acer H7530D DLP Projector - Acer H7530D

Summary

Our Score

User Score

That last statement on the previous page has to be followed by an inevitable 'however’, though. For the H7530’s performance certainly isn’t immune to the compromises of its cheap price point.

The first and worst problem is a predictable one: rainbow effect. The reproduction in the picture of stripes of red, green and blue over really bright image elements and in your peripheral vision when you move your eyes around the image is a hugely common problem with all single-chip DLP projectors, but especially budget ones. And it really can be distracting on the H7530D during dark scenes like the one in Casino Royale where Bond crashes his Aston Martin while trying not to run over Vesper.

Similarly, very bright image parts in console or PC games can show clear rainbowing, especially if what you’re doing requires you to rove your eye around the image in search of, say, an elusive enemy.

To put this point in more perspective, the Acer’s rainbow effect doesn’t actually render scenes borderline unwatchable, as can happen occasionally with BenQ’s uber-cheap (£500) W600 DLP projector. It also doesn’t seem more pervasive than it is on BenQ’s W1000. But the Vivitek H1085 certainly seems to suffer from it slightly less, and in doing so becomes instantly more consistently engaging.

The H7530D’s pictures also sometimes look a touch noisy - another common budget DLP flaw. Though this only becomes distracting on the rare occasions where it takes the form of blotchy skin tone reproduction.

I should say, too, that the H7530D’s colour palette can look a little too influenced by yellowy-green when using the provided presets, and I didn’t manage to wholly remove this even after manual colour calibration.

Finally, the projector isn’t the quietest runner around, clocking in at a hefty 30dB with the lamp set to maximum output, but still running at 26dB even with the lamp running in its Eco low brightness mode.

Verdict

In many ways Acer’s H7530D is a pleasant surprise, proving again that the DLP chipsets now available to even £1,000 projectors are of a standard that would have been unimaginable as little as a year ago. It certainly still warrants at least an audition against its BenQ W1000 and Vivitek H1085 arch rivals. Though I suspect that many people who actually manage to put such a shootout together will probably reach the same conclusion that I did: namely that when push comes to shove, the relative reduction on the Vivitek H1085 of the rainbow effect makes it the one to go for, despite the H7530D having a slight advantage in the colour saturation and brightness departments.